Dining on Ashes

It was an Age of Wonders …and it was all falling apart.

The city of Ludheim stands at the edge of Vorel, where the Three Rivers meet the Sea. The dark and terrifying Oth Xhud Mountains ring the city, and for centuries it has been a beacon for trade and civilization. The Church of the Dragon Lord Vhermithrax keeps order from behind a smiling facade, because Ludheim is a valuable jewel; its Merchant Princes know the secret of airship construction and the Mountains hold rich veins of dragonstone. With this, the city’s stone-burning ships criss-cross the world spreading commerce, communication, and knowledge. Burning the dragonstone affords the city vast power, but everything, especially the poorer parts of town, carries a thin layer of soot.

Something has changed. The world was never a safe place, but now monsters and even more alien…things…stalk the land. Rumors abound of strange events; lights in the sky, bizarre weather, great pits opening in the earth. The treasures and curses of lost empires are being dredged. Something is coming…

Tom mentioned that we could redo our feats for 2nd level giving us the chance to fix any goofs we made since we’re not completely familiar with Pathfinder’s way of doing things. In that vein, I’d like to swap out my shocking grasp spell for magic missile because I’ve yet to actually touch any enemy with anything other than my spear.

I think we should stick with the rules as written. To stop bleeding you need to make a DC15 Heal check. So if you don’t have the skill the only modifier you have is your wisdom bonus or penalty. A 15 is not a sure thing.

And with critical hits it is very possible to have a very large amount of damage even at 1st level. For example if I rolled 8 damage +3 for strength (11) with my spear and got a critical hit I would do 33 points of damage. This is at first level with no feats.

With critical hits and Feats, many hits are much more deadly than they were in old D&D and even 3rd edition you had a 10% chance per round to stabilize without anyone doing anything. So with these rules it can be just as deadly if not more so than 3rd edition.

But since the thought of certain death has been brought up, I would like to discuss:

Death

In the Pathfinder rules, you are not dead until you are at the negative number of your CON or lower. For the scrawny types, this can mean death comes a bit sooner than the old D&D way which set the level at -10. This isn’t a problem for my Sorceror who has a CON of 14. At low level, it’s very unlikely that we are going to run into anything that can knock me down from 10 or more hit points to less than -14. Sure, Tom could throw an ancient dragon at us and do it, but assuming he is fair, things doing 1D12 are likely to be the worse we’ll face anytime soon.

Consider what it would take to kill one of our beefier types that has a CON of 17. If such a character gets knocked to -1, we have 16 rounds to come to that character’s aid. With 16 rounds, we could hold a tea party, read some poetry, and maybe do a bit of knitting before meandering over to our fallen comrade to slap a bandaid on him.

Basically, I don’t think Tom has much chance of killing anyone individually. A total party kill is the only thing we really have to worry about because then there will be no one around to put the band-aids on those of us who got knocked out. Tom came close to achieving this, but wiping out the party isn’t really his goal. And individually, we’re fine because we can lie around for a dozen or more rounds.

Basically, I don’t think the game is lethal enough. I think we should at least return to the D&D standard of -10 = dead. I’d even say we go hardcore and make it -6 or -5. We’re old school gamers! No namby pansy hope you didn’t get hurt rules for us I say!